Saumon Fumée
by John Barton
Whoever translated the menu
at Angeline in Les Galleries Lafayette
did so badly, there’s no escaping
the aftertaste of his words in my mouth
as if they were in the mouth of another
my heart giddy and dissociate—
‘smocked salmon’ à la carte…
—an epiphany perhaps, but not
the food of love, instead a net full
of this year’s declining catch
stood atwirl on their tail-fins
the best of their generation lined up
and looking quite fetching in frilled
aprons with bibs smocked
like those my mother would hand
stitch for my sisters and no doubt
for me, costumed in drag before
I had any taste, foretelling
in habit what I—like these mincing
fish—am proficient at: kicking
up my heels in some nicotine-rank
torch-song bistro in the Marais
assuming the fishy body
language of this sleek chorus line
their flesh not yet terminally infused
with smoke before they doff
aprons into the ravenous arms
of the audience to swim upstream
in the buff into the highlands
virile bodies tattered by rocks
skin hanging away in strips
the teeming whitewater rouged
up as sunset or sunburn—
more like sharks in a bathhouse
these frowsy crepuscular doyennes
than the pretty-headed torpedos
of svelte with quick-fire payloads
they once were—prematurely
aged by the journey backwards
to the source, which is not
the destiny of anything kissable
and where they elect not to
spawn, but spill their DNA
unregenerate onto the stream’s
bed of gravel, together or alone
for the hell of it, kamikaze
and correct in whatever language
however battered by love—
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